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221-TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH – WHAT IS ITS IMPORTANCE TO
NURSING PRACTICE?
In recent decades, the initiatives to develop individual, collaborative, or multicentric nursing re-search have multiplied throughout the world. The objective of such initiative has been to improve the quality of nursing care given, offering greater security to patients and inluencing more effective health care policies. Research based on evidence, clinical research, systematic literature reviews, convergent-care research, phenomenological studies, and social representations all share the same objective: to respond to professional practice questions. However, despite all the knowledge such efforts have produced, there is a vacuum among the studies and the use of the results from research carried out in public or hospital health care services.
Translational research has arisen in an attempt to ill in the vacuum and approximate the researcher to ields of practice.1 While the term is relatively new, the notion of “translating (or transferring) re -search results” is not, as it has been discussed since the 1970s and 80s in the United States and Brazil in National Nursing Research Seminars. One can highlight that as early as 1984 a study about “how to incorporate nursing research results to professional practice”2 was proposed.
The irst publication on the subject under the classiication of translational research is seen in an editorial of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), in 2002, when “(…) the need to translate new knowledge, mechanisms, and techniques generated towards advancing basic research in order to offer new possibilities of preventing, diagnosing, and treating disease”3:10 is declared to be
essential to improving human health. As of this publication, the remaining areas of health sciences, including nursing, have begun to more accurately question their forms manners of conducting such “translation” into care practices.
In 2005, The Translational Research Working Group (TRWG), associated with the National Cancer Institute in the USA, was created with the objective of offering incentive and inancing translational research, in this speciic area. The University of Washington created the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) in 2007 in order to strengthen genetic medicine. Two relevant periodicals were also created in 2009, Translational Research – The journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine,and The American Journal of Translational Research.
In nursing, the utilization of the concept is that the translation of new knowledge and its incor -poration into clinical practice is essential. The growth of the nursing science felt its peak in 2005 when the Nursing Research Society, associated with the University of Columbia’s Nursing School promoted its 17th Annual Scientiic Session, placing “The importance of academic and interdisciplinary research ‘translation’ to promoting quality patient care” as its central theme. The Session’s organizers decided to select the best translational research to receive inancial awards as well as publication in the Nursing Research periodical. Eleven studies were selected for this issue.3
The following year, the National Institute of Nursing Research in the USA developed a consortium with health care and research institutions involved in translational research in order to create the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs). The idea of this consortium is to inance translational research throughout the country, attempting to accelerate the “translation” of laboratory treatment discover-ies in patient reality, integrating local communitdiscover-ies in research, as well as to train a new generation of translational researchers and clinicians.4 In this sense, one aspect which researchers who defend translational research focus upon is the importance of interdisciplinary work in developing studies
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which may not only resolve health care problems for patients and communities, but also inluence the formation of health care policies conducive to the population’s needs.
I think that the Brazilian Nursing scientiic community, while it has not assumed translational research as the central object of its scientiic production, has manifested the same concern in promot -ing, inanc-ing, and giving incentive to the development of intervention research, or research which provokes change within practical care, within the resolution of important health care problems, like cancer, cardiovascular issues, diabetes, obesity, AIDS, and others.
The vacuum which must still be fulilled, in my view, is the strengthening of studies which truly seek to transform and integrate the scientiic community and the care community. In order to do so, partnerships between schools, community organizations, health care services, and scientists are es -sential within an alteration of roles from those who produce knowledge to that which applies the knowledge produced.
Scientiic periodicals also have the responsibility to offer readers original articles which truly contain innovation, simple measurements, and practical and effective results which may be success -fully applied throughout the country, even internationally. Thus, selecting original articles for each of its quarterly publications is one of the greatest commitments and contributions of Texto & Contexto Nursing Journal.
REFERENCES
1. Bakken S. Jones DA. Contributions to translational research for quality health outcomes. Nursing Research. 2006 Mar-Apr; 55(2):S1-2.
2. Castro IB, Miranda CML, Rodrigues AP, Silva MJ. Diiculdades na incorporação dos resultados de pesquisa
na prática da enfermagem. In: Anais do 4º Seminário Nacional de Pesquisa em Enfermagem, 1985; São Paulo, Brasil. São Paulo: ABEn; 1985. p.193-242.
3. Woods NF, Magyary DL. Translational research: why nursing’s interdisciplinary collaboration is essential.
Res Theory Nurs Pract. 2010; 24(1):9-24.
4. Grady P. Translational research and nursing science. Nurs Outlook. 58(3):164-6.
Dra. Maria Itayra Padilha
Editor of Texto & Contexto Nursing Journal. Faculty of the Graduate Nursing Program at the Federal Uni-versity of Santa Catarina –UFSC - Brazil. Post-Doctorate from the UniUni-versity of Toronto, Canada. Leader of
the History of Nursing and Health Care Knowledge Research Group. CNPq Researcher.
